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Whistler's bear man turns attention to cougars

Two men are following the footsteps of cougars this winter, armed with video cameras. "People around Princeton think we're nuts," said Michael Allen, Whistler's foremost black bear researcher turned cougar enthusiast.

Two men are following the footsteps of cougars this winter, armed with video cameras.

"People around Princeton think we're nuts," said Michael Allen, Whistler's foremost black bear researcher turned cougar enthusiast.

The pair is made up of Allen and his friend Jeff Turner, a film producer who, with his wife Sue, specializes in wildlife documentaries for the BBC.

The Turners met Allen about four years ago while making a documentary about Whistler's black bears called In the Company of Bears.

"We've shared a common interest in wildlife education in B.C.," said Allen.

Now they want to teach people about cougars and dispel the myth that cougars are vicious predators who randomly attack humans at will.

"A lot of the books and the Internet are all sensationalized on the attacks," said Allen.

"The goal of the film is to try to represent the animals in an unbiased way."

For the past three months, the duo has had their heads bent downwards on their snowmobiles, studying the snow near Princeton B.C. in search of cougar tracks.

This area is a low-lying valley where the deer come to feed and the cougars come to prey on deer. Allen describes it as "the heart of cougar country."

It was near here where Cindy Parolin was mauled to death by a yearling cougar in 1996 after it attacked her young son.

But cougar attacks are rare, said Allen, although they generate media frenzy.

Over the last 100 years there have been about 10 fatal cougar attacks in the province, most involving young children.

"They always need protein. That's kind of their downfall. That's what makes them so fierce when there's an attack," said Allen.

Cougars need meat because they are obligate carnivores – they cannot survive without it.

"They're probably the most effective land carnivore in North America," said Allen.

"They're all muscle and all claws and their teeth are designed for shearing and tearing meat.

"They're built to rip you apart."

A cougar will ambush its prey after stalking it and will head straight for the jugular or the spine of the animal. They use their sharp canine teeth to puncture the important organs.

Most of the time they can take down an animal that is bigger than them because of their sheer power.

Cougars will usually attack humans when the deer counts are low and they're starving. Then they have no other course of action but to wander into communities in search of food, generally looking for cats or dogs. Usually the cougar is a yearling (between one or two years old) that is in search of a home range after becoming independent of its mother.

This hype about the dangers of cougars doesn't worry Allen as he spends his days tracking them down.

"Cougars have gotten a bad name," he said.

One week into their filmmaking odyssey, Allen and Turner found their first cougar looking down at them from its perch about 25 metres up a tree.

The men stood there talking about the animal as the cougar watched and after an hour it fell asleep.

"It was the most passive creature that I've ever seen," said Allen.

He was surprised that they found a cougar so quickly because they are tracking the animals the old-fashioned way, by simply following their prints without the help of dogs or radio collars.

"It's probably the most primitive way to study an animal," he said.

Allen has a lot of experience tracking animals as a result of his work with the bears. But tracking cougars is a little different.

"Cougars are just very elusive and they are hard to find," he said.

They are hunters by nature and move through the landscape with stealth.

They are also nocturnal animals who do most of their hunting in the small hours of the morning.

Those are just some of the challenges that the men face as they film their subjects.

To accommodate the cougars' nighttime habits, the men place road kill, usually dead deer, at the base of a tree and set up infrared cameras nearby.

The meat is tied to the tree to stop the cougar from carrying it away. The animal will feed on part of it and then bury the rest to preserve it. It will usually come back later that night or the following night to finish it off.

Meanwhile Turner films the feast with an infrared camera in a nearby tent.

"We've gotten just spectacular footage," said Allen.

Allen had also been tracking two females in his area. He suspected that one had a den because she was using a small hunting ground.

One day he was following her tracks when he stumbled across a big old growth cedar about two and a half metres wide with cougar tracks patterning the snow at the base. Part of the bottom of the tree was hollowed out.

As Allen peeked in his suspicions were confirmed.

There, huddled against the back wall of the hole were three little kittens, each about the size of a small dog with the telltale kitten spots dotting their bodies.

When they came out of the den, Turner and Allen filmed the kittens at play, diving, lunging and wrestling each other to the ground.

This was the first time they had the chance to capture wild footage during the day.

As these kittens grow they will lose their spots and become one colour. Their tails will grow to about one third their body length. An adult male can grow up to 200 pounds. Allen calls them "beautiful creatures."

He estimates the filming will be done by the spring and eventually it will be an hour long documentary for the BBC.

They are not using any captive animals for the shoot because the object is to show people how cougars live naturally.

"Cougars are kind of hooking me a bit just like bears did. They're both at the top of the food chain," said Allen.

"What they feed on shapes their behaviour. A (black) bear is very passive... his selection pressures are winter and no natural food, whereas a cougar has to do the same thing all year round. It's the true carnivore."

Now that he's hooked, Allen is thinking about doing some cougar education along with his bear education, revealing the nature of Canada's largest cat.